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134 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

2017

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A Generative Model of People in Clothing

Lassner, C., Pons-Moll, G., Gehler, P. V.

In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, October 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We present the first image-based generative model of people in clothing in a full-body setting. We sidestep the commonly used complex graphics rendering pipeline and the need for high-quality 3D scans of dressed people. Instead, we learn generative models from a large image database. The main challenge is to cope with the high variance in human pose, shape and appearance. For this reason, pure image-based approaches have not been considered so far. We show that this challenge can be overcome by splitting the generating process in two parts. First, we learn to generate a semantic segmentation of the body and clothing. Second, we learn a conditional model on the resulting segments that creates realistic images. The full model is differentiable and can be conditioned on pose, shape or color. The result are samples of people in different clothing items and styles. The proposed model can generate entirely new people with realistic clothing. In several experiments we present encouraging results that suggest an entirely data-driven approach to people generation is possible.

link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

2017

Lassner, C., Pons-Moll, G., Gehler, P. V. A Generative Model of People in Clothing In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, October 2017 (inproceedings)

link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

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Semantic Video CNNs through Representation Warping

Gadde, R., Jampani, V., Gehler, P. V.

In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, October 2017 (inproceedings) Accepted

Abstract
In this work, we propose a technique to convert CNN models for semantic segmentation of static images into CNNs for video data. We describe a warping method that can be used to augment existing architectures with very lit- tle extra computational cost. This module is called Net- Warp and we demonstrate its use for a range of network architectures. The main design principle is to use optical flow of adjacent frames for warping internal network repre- sentations across time. A key insight of this work is that fast optical flow methods can be combined with many different CNN architectures for improved performance and end-to- end training. Experiments validate that the proposed ap- proach incurs only little extra computational cost, while im- proving performance, when video streams are available. We achieve new state-of-the-art results on the standard CamVid and Cityscapes benchmark datasets and show reliable im- provements over different baseline networks. Our code and models are available at http://segmentation.is. tue.mpg.de

pdf Supplementary Project Page [BibTex]

Gadde, R., Jampani, V., Gehler, P. V. Semantic Video CNNs through Representation Warping In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, October 2017 (inproceedings) Accepted

pdf Supplementary Project Page [BibTex]

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A simple yet effective baseline for 3d human pose estimation

Martinez, J., Hossain, R., Romero, J., Little, J. J.

In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, October 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Following the success of deep convolutional networks, state-of-the-art methods for 3d human pose estimation have focused on deep end-to-end systems that predict 3d joint locations given raw image pixels. Despite their excellent performance, it is often not easy to understand whether their remaining error stems from a limited 2d pose (visual) understanding, or from a failure to map 2d poses into 3-dimensional positions. With the goal of understanding these sources of error, we set out to build a system that given 2d joint locations predicts 3d positions. Much to our surprise, we have found that, with current technology, "lifting" ground truth 2d joint locations to 3d space is a task that can be solved with a remarkably low error rate: a relatively simple deep feed-forward network outperforms the best reported result by about 30\% on Human3.6M, the largest publicly available 3d pose estimation benchmark. Furthermore, training our system on the output of an off-the-shelf state-of-the-art 2d detector (\ie, using images as input) yields state of the art results -- this includes an array of systems that have been trained end-to-end specifically for this task. Our results indicate that a large portion of the error of modern deep 3d pose estimation systems stems from their visual analysis, and suggests directions to further advance the state of the art in 3d human pose estimation.

video code arxiv pdf preprint Project Page [BibTex]

Martinez, J., Hossain, R., Romero, J., Little, J. J. A simple yet effective baseline for 3d human pose estimation In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, October 2017 (inproceedings)

video code arxiv pdf preprint Project Page [BibTex]

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Parameterized Model of 2D Articulated Human Shape

Black, M. J., Freifeld, O., Weiss, A., Loper, M., Guan, P.

September 2017, U.S.~Patent 9,761,060 (misc)

Abstract
Disclosed are computer-readable devices, systems and methods for generating a model of a clothed body. The method includes generating a model of an unclothed human body, the model capturing a shape or a pose of the unclothed human body, determining two-dimensional contours associated with the model, and computing deformations by aligning a contour of a clothed human body with a contour of the unclothed human body. Based on the two-dimensional contours and the deformations, the method includes generating a first two-dimensional model of the unclothed human body, the first two-dimensional model factoring the deformations of the unclothed human body into one or more of a shape variation component, a viewpoint change, and a pose variation and learning an eigen-clothing model using principal component analysis applied to the deformations, wherein the eigen-clothing model classifies different types of clothing, to yield a second two-dimensional model of a clothed human body.

Google Patents [BibTex]

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Effects of animation retargeting on perceived action outcomes

Kenny, S., Mahmood, N., Honda, C., Black, M. J., Troje, N. F.

Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP’17), pages: 2:1-2:7, September 2017 (conference)

Abstract
The individual shape of the human body, including the geometry of its articulated structure and the distribution of weight over that structure, influences the kinematics of a person's movements. How sensitive is the visual system to inconsistencies between shape and motion introduced by retargeting motion from one person onto the shape of another? We used optical motion capture to record five pairs of male performers with large differences in body weight, while they pushed, lifted, and threw objects. Based on a set of 67 markers, we estimated both the kinematics of the actions as well as the performer's individual body shape. To obtain consistent and inconsistent stimuli, we created animated avatars by combining the shape and motion estimates from either a single performer or from different performers. In a virtual reality environment, observers rated the perceived weight or thrown distance of the objects. They were also asked to explicitly discriminate between consistent and hybrid stimuli. Observers were unable to accomplish the latter, but hybridization of shape and motion influenced their judgements of action outcome in systematic ways. Inconsistencies between shape and motion were assimilated into an altered perception of the action outcome.

pdf DOI [BibTex]

Kenny, S., Mahmood, N., Honda, C., Black, M. J., Troje, N. F. Effects of animation retargeting on perceived action outcomes Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP’17), pages: 2:1-2:7, September 2017 (conference)

pdf DOI [BibTex]

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Coupling Adaptive Batch Sizes with Learning Rates

Balles, L., Romero, J., Hennig, P.

In Proceedings Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2017, pages: 410-419, (Editors: Gal Elidan and Kristian Kersting), Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI), August 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Mini-batch stochastic gradient descent and variants thereof have become standard for large-scale empirical risk minimization like the training of neural networks. These methods are usually used with a constant batch size chosen by simple empirical inspection. The batch size significantly influences the behavior of the stochastic optimization algorithm, though, since it determines the variance of the gradient estimates. This variance also changes over the optimization process; when using a constant batch size, stability and convergence is thus often enforced by means of a (manually tuned) decreasing learning rate schedule. We propose a practical method for dynamic batch size adaptation. It estimates the variance of the stochastic gradients and adapts the batch size to decrease the variance proportionally to the value of the objective function, removing the need for the aforementioned learning rate decrease. In contrast to recent related work, our algorithm couples the batch size to the learning rate, directly reflecting the known relationship between the two. On three image classification benchmarks, our batch size adaptation yields faster optimization convergence, while simultaneously simplifying learning rate tuning. A TensorFlow implementation is available.

Code link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

Balles, L., Romero, J., Hennig, P. Coupling Adaptive Batch Sizes with Learning Rates In Proceedings Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2017, pages: 410-419, (Editors: Gal Elidan and Kristian Kersting), Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI), August 2017 (inproceedings)

Code link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

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Crowdshaping Realistic 3D Avatars with Words

Streuber, S., Ramirez, M. Q., Black, M., Zuffi, S., O’Toole, A., Hill, M. Q., Hahn, C. A.

August 2017, Application PCT/EP2017/051954 (misc)

Abstract
A method for generating a body shape, comprising the steps: - receiving one or more linguistic descriptors related to the body shape; - retrieving an association between the one or more linguistic descriptors and a body shape; and - generating the body shape, based on the association.

Google Patents [BibTex]

Streuber, S., Ramirez, M. Q., Black, M., Zuffi, S., O’Toole, A., Hill, M. Q., Hahn, C. A. Crowdshaping Realistic 3D Avatars with Words August 2017, Application PCT/EP2017/051954 (misc)

Google Patents [BibTex]

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Joint Graph Decomposition and Node Labeling by Local Search

Levinkov, E., Uhrig, J., Tang, S., Omran, M., Insafutdinov, E., Kirillov, A., Rother, C., Brox, T., Schiele, B., Andres, B.

In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 1904-1912, IEEE, July 2017 (inproceedings)

PDF Supplementary DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Levinkov, E., Uhrig, J., Tang, S., Omran, M., Insafutdinov, E., Kirillov, A., Rother, C., Brox, T., Schiele, B., Andres, B. Joint Graph Decomposition and Node Labeling by Local Search In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 1904-1912, IEEE, July 2017 (inproceedings)

PDF Supplementary DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Dynamic FAUST: Registering Human Bodies in Motion

Bogo, F., Romero, J., Pons-Moll, G., Black, M. J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
While the ready availability of 3D scan data has influenced research throughout computer vision, less attention has focused on 4D data; that is 3D scans of moving nonrigid objects, captured over time. To be useful for vision research, such 4D scans need to be registered, or aligned, to a common topology. Consequently, extending mesh registration methods to 4D is important. Unfortunately, no ground-truth datasets are available for quantitative evaluation and comparison of 4D registration methods. To address this we create a novel dataset of high-resolution 4D scans of human subjects in motion, captured at 60 fps. We propose a new mesh registration method that uses both 3D geometry and texture information to register all scans in a sequence to a common reference topology. The approach exploits consistency in texture over both short and long time intervals and deals with temporal offsets between shape and texture capture. We show how using geometry alone results in significant errors in alignment when the motions are fast and non-rigid. We evaluate the accuracy of our registration and provide a dataset of 40,000 raw and aligned meshes. Dynamic FAUST extends the popular FAUST dataset to dynamic 4D data, and is available for research purposes at http://dfaust.is.tue.mpg.de.

pdf video Project Page Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Bogo, F., Romero, J., Pons-Moll, G., Black, M. J. Dynamic FAUST: Registering Human Bodies in Motion In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf video Project Page Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Learning from Synthetic Humans

Varol, G., Romero, J., Martin, X., Mahmood, N., Black, M. J., Laptev, I., Schmid, C.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Estimating human pose, shape, and motion from images and videos are fundamental challenges with many applications. Recent advances in 2D human pose estimation use large amounts of manually-labeled training data for learning convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Such data is time consuming to acquire and difficult to extend. Moreover, manual labeling of 3D pose, depth and motion is impractical. In this work we present SURREAL (Synthetic hUmans foR REAL tasks): a new large-scale dataset with synthetically-generated but realistic images of people rendered from 3D sequences of human motion capture data. We generate more than 6 million frames together with ground truth pose, depth maps, and segmentation masks. We show that CNNs trained on our synthetic dataset allow for accurate human depth estimation and human part segmentation in real RGB images. Our results and the new dataset open up new possibilities for advancing person analysis using cheap and large-scale synthetic data.

arXiv project data Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Varol, G., Romero, J., Martin, X., Mahmood, N., Black, M. J., Laptev, I., Schmid, C. Learning from Synthetic Humans In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

arXiv project data Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks

Martinez, J., Black, M. J., Romero, J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Human motion modelling is a classical problem at the intersection of graphics and computer vision, with applications spanning human-computer interaction, motion synthesis, and motion prediction for virtual and augmented reality. Following the success of deep learning methods in several computer vision tasks, recent work has focused on using deep recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to model human motion, with the goal of learning time-dependent representations that perform tasks such as short-term motion prediction and long-term human motion synthesis. We examine recent work, with a focus on the evaluation methodologies commonly used in the literature, and show that, surprisingly, state-of-the-art performance can be achieved by a simple baseline that does not attempt to model motion at all. We investigate this result, and analyze recent RNN methods by looking at the architectures, loss functions, and training procedures used in state-of-the-art approaches. We propose three changes to the standard RNN models typically used for human motion, which result in a simple and scalable RNN architecture that obtains state-of-the-art performance on human motion prediction.

arXiv Project Page [BibTex]

Martinez, J., Black, M. J., Romero, J. On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

arXiv Project Page [BibTex]

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Articulated Multi-person Tracking in the Wild

Insafutdinov, E., Andriluka, M., Pishchulin, L., Tang, S., Levinkov, E., Andres, B., Schiele, B.

In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 1293-1301, IEEE, July 2017, Oral (inproceedings)

DOI [BibTex]

Insafutdinov, E., Andriluka, M., Pishchulin, L., Tang, S., Levinkov, E., Andres, B., Schiele, B. Articulated Multi-person Tracking in the Wild In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 1293-1301, IEEE, July 2017, Oral (inproceedings)

DOI [BibTex]

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Slow Flow: Exploiting High-Speed Cameras for Accurate and Diverse Optical Flow Reference Data

Janai, J., Güney, F., Wulff, J., Black, M., Geiger, A.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 1406-1416, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Existing optical flow datasets are limited in size and variability due to the difficulty of capturing dense ground truth. In this paper, we tackle this problem by tracking pixels through densely sampled space-time volumes recorded with a high-speed video camera. Our model exploits the linearity of small motions and reasons about occlusions from multiple frames. Using our technique, we are able to establish accurate reference flow fields outside the laboratory in natural environments. Besides, we show how our predictions can be used to augment the input images with realistic motion blur. We demonstrate the quality of the produced flow fields on synthetic and real-world datasets. Finally, we collect a novel challenging optical flow dataset by applying our technique on data from a high-speed camera and analyze the performance of the state-of-the-art in optical flow under various levels of motion blur.

pdf suppmat Project page Video DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Janai, J., Güney, F., Wulff, J., Black, M., Geiger, A. Slow Flow: Exploiting High-Speed Cameras for Accurate and Diverse Optical Flow Reference Data In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 1406-1416, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Project page Video DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Optical Flow in Mostly Rigid Scenes

Wulff, J., Sevilla-Lara, L., Black, M. J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 6911-6920, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
The optical flow of natural scenes is a combination of the motion of the observer and the independent motion of objects. Existing algorithms typically focus on either recovering motion and structure under the assumption of a purely static world or optical flow for general unconstrained scenes. We combine these approaches in an optical flow algorithm that estimates an explicit segmentation of moving objects from appearance and physical constraints. In static regions we take advantage of strong constraints to jointly estimate the camera motion and the 3D structure of the scene over multiple frames. This allows us to also regularize the structure instead of the motion. Our formulation uses a Plane+Parallax framework, which works even under small baselines, and reduces the motion estimation to a one-dimensional search problem, resulting in more accurate estimation. In moving regions the flow is treated as unconstrained, and computed with an existing optical flow method. The resulting Mostly-Rigid Flow (MR-Flow) method achieves state-of-the-art results on both the MPISintel and KITTI-2015 benchmarks.

pdf SupMat video code Project Page [BibTex]

Wulff, J., Sevilla-Lara, L., Black, M. J. Optical Flow in Mostly Rigid Scenes In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 6911-6920, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf SupMat video code Project Page [BibTex]

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OctNet: Learning Deep 3D Representations at High Resolutions

Riegler, G., Ulusoy, O., Geiger, A.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We present OctNet, a representation for deep learning with sparse 3D data. In contrast to existing models, our representation enables 3D convolutional networks which are both deep and high resolution. Towards this goal, we exploit the sparsity in the input data to hierarchically partition the space using a set of unbalanced octrees where each leaf node stores a pooled feature representation. This allows to focus memory allocation and computation to the relevant dense regions and enables deeper networks without compromising resolution. We demonstrate the utility of our OctNet representation by analyzing the impact of resolution on several 3D tasks including 3D object classification, orientation estimation and point cloud labeling.

pdf suppmat Project Page Video Project Page [BibTex]

Riegler, G., Ulusoy, O., Geiger, A. OctNet: Learning Deep 3D Representations at High Resolutions In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Project Page Video Project Page [BibTex]

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Reflectance Adaptive Filtering Improves Intrinsic Image Estimation

Nestmeyer, T., Gehler, P. V.

In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 1771-1780, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pre-print DOI Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Nestmeyer, T., Gehler, P. V. Reflectance Adaptive Filtering Improves Intrinsic Image Estimation In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 1771-1780, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pre-print DOI Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Detailed, accurate, human shape estimation from clothed 3D scan sequences

Zhang, C., Pujades, S., Black, M., Pons-Moll, G.

In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, July 2017, Spotlight (inproceedings)

Abstract
We address the problem of estimating human body shape from 3D scans over time. Reliable estimation of 3D body shape is necessary for many applications including virtual try-on, health monitoring, and avatar creation for virtual reality. Scanning bodies in minimal clothing, however, presents a practical barrier to these applications. We address this problem by estimating body shape under clothing from a sequence of 3D scans. Previous methods that have exploited statistical models of body shape produce overly smooth shapes lacking personalized details. In this paper we contribute a new approach to recover not only an approximate shape of the person, but also their detailed shape. Our approach allows the estimated shape to deviate from a parametric model to fit the 3D scans. We demonstrate the method using high quality 4D data as well as sequences of visual hulls extracted from multi-view images. We also make available a new high quality 4D dataset that enables quantitative evaluation. Our method outperforms the previous state of the art, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

arxiv_preprint video dataset pdf supplemental DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Zhang, C., Pujades, S., Black, M., Pons-Moll, G. Detailed, accurate, human shape estimation from clothed 3D scan sequences In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, July 2017, Spotlight (inproceedings)

arxiv_preprint video dataset pdf supplemental DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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3D Menagerie: Modeling the 3D Shape and Pose of Animals

Zuffi, S., Kanazawa, A., Jacobs, D., Black, M. J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 5524-5532, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
There has been significant work on learning realistic, articulated, 3D models of the human body. In contrast, there are few such models of animals, despite many applications. The main challenge is that animals are much less cooperative than humans. The best human body models are learned from thousands of 3D scans of people in specific poses, which is infeasible with live animals. Consequently, we learn our model from a small set of 3D scans of toy figurines in arbitrary poses. We employ a novel part-based shape model to compute an initial registration to the scans. We then normalize their pose, learn a statistical shape model, and refine the registrations and the model together. In this way, we accurately align animal scans from different quadruped families with very different shapes and poses. With the registration to a common template we learn a shape space representing animals including lions, cats, dogs, horses, cows and hippos. Animal shapes can be sampled from the model, posed, animated, and fit to data. We demonstrate generalization by fitting it to images of real animals including species not seen in training.

pdf video Project Page [BibTex]

Zuffi, S., Kanazawa, A., Jacobs, D., Black, M. J. 3D Menagerie: Modeling the 3D Shape and Pose of Animals In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 5524-5532, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf video Project Page [BibTex]

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Optical Flow Estimation using a Spatial Pyramid Network

Ranjan, A., Black, M.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We learn to compute optical flow by combining a classical spatial-pyramid formulation with deep learning. This estimates large motions in a coarse-to-fine approach by warping one image of a pair at each pyramid level by the current flow estimate and computing an update to the flow. Instead of the standard minimization of an objective function at each pyramid level, we train one deep network per level to compute the flow update. Unlike the recent FlowNet approach, the networks do not need to deal with large motions; these are dealt with by the pyramid. This has several advantages. First, our Spatial Pyramid Network (SPyNet) is much simpler and 96% smaller than FlowNet in terms of model parameters. This makes it more efficient and appropriate for embedded applications. Second, since the flow at each pyramid level is small (< 1 pixel), a convolutional approach applied to pairs of warped images is appropriate. Third, unlike FlowNet, the learned convolution filters appear similar to classical spatio-temporal filters, giving insight into the method and how to improve it. Our results are more accurate than FlowNet on most standard benchmarks, suggesting a new direction of combining classical flow methods with deep learning.

pdf SupMat project/code [BibTex]

Ranjan, A., Black, M. Optical Flow Estimation using a Spatial Pyramid Network In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf SupMat project/code [BibTex]

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Multiple People Tracking by Lifted Multicut and Person Re-identification

Tang, S., Andriluka, M., Andres, B., Schiele, B.

In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 3701-3710, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Tang, S., Andriluka, M., Andres, B., Schiele, B. Multiple People Tracking by Lifted Multicut and Person Re-identification In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 3701-3710, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Video Propagation Networks

Jampani, V., Gadde, R., Gehler, P. V.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf supplementary arXiv project page code Project Page [BibTex]

Jampani, V., Gadde, R., Gehler, P. V. Video Propagation Networks In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf supplementary arXiv project page code Project Page [BibTex]

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Generating Descriptions with Grounded and Co-Referenced People

Rohrbach, A., Rohrbach, M., Tang, S., Oh, S. J., Schiele, B.

In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 4196-4206, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

PDF DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Rohrbach, A., Rohrbach, M., Tang, S., Oh, S. J., Schiele, B. Generating Descriptions with Grounded and Co-Referenced People In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 4196-4206, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

PDF DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Semantic Multi-view Stereo: Jointly Estimating Objects and Voxels

Ulusoy, A. O., Black, M. J., Geiger, A.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Dense 3D reconstruction from RGB images is a highly ill-posed problem due to occlusions, textureless or reflective surfaces, as well as other challenges. We propose object-level shape priors to address these ambiguities. Towards this goal, we formulate a probabilistic model that integrates multi-view image evidence with 3D shape information from multiple objects. Inference in this model yields a dense 3D reconstruction of the scene as well as the existence and precise 3D pose of the objects in it. Our approach is able to recover fine details not captured in the input shapes while defaulting to the input models in occluded regions where image evidence is weak. Due to its probabilistic nature, the approach is able to cope with the approximate geometry of the 3D models as well as input shapes that are not present in the scene. We evaluate the approach quantitatively on several challenging indoor and outdoor datasets.

YouTube pdf suppmat Project Page [BibTex]

Ulusoy, A. O., Black, M. J., Geiger, A. Semantic Multi-view Stereo: Jointly Estimating Objects and Voxels In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

YouTube pdf suppmat Project Page [BibTex]

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Deep representation learning for human motion prediction and classification

Bütepage, J., Black, M., Kragic, D., Kjellström, H.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Generative models of 3D human motion are often restricted to a small number of activities and can therefore not generalize well to novel movements or applications. In this work we propose a deep learning framework for human motion capture data that learns a generic representation from a large corpus of motion capture data and generalizes well to new, unseen, motions. Using an encoding-decoding network that learns to predict future 3D poses from the most recent past, we extract a feature representation of human motion. Most work on deep learning for sequence prediction focuses on video and speech. Since skeletal data has a different structure, we present and evaluate different network architectures that make different assumptions about time dependencies and limb correlations. To quantify the learned features, we use the output of different layers for action classification and visualize the receptive fields of the network units. Our method outperforms the recent state of the art in skeletal motion prediction even though these use action specific training data. Our results show that deep feedforward networks, trained from a generic mocap database, can successfully be used for feature extraction from human motion data and that this representation can be used as a foundation for classification and prediction.

arXiv Project Page [BibTex]

Bütepage, J., Black, M., Kragic, D., Kjellström, H. Deep representation learning for human motion prediction and classification In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

arXiv Project Page [BibTex]

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Unite the People: Closing the Loop Between 3D and 2D Human Representations

Lassner, C., Romero, J., Kiefel, M., Bogo, F., Black, M. J., Gehler, P. V.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
3D models provide a common ground for different representations of human bodies. In turn, robust 2D estimation has proven to be a powerful tool to obtain 3D fits “in-the-wild”. However, depending on the level of detail, it can be hard to impossible to acquire labeled data for training 2D estimators on large scale. We propose a hybrid approach to this problem: with an extended version of the recently introduced SMPLify method, we obtain high quality 3D body model fits for multiple human pose datasets. Human annotators solely sort good and bad fits. This procedure leads to an initial dataset, UP-3D, with rich annotations. With a comprehensive set of experiments, we show how this data can be used to train discriminative models that produce results with an unprecedented level of detail: our models predict 31 segments and 91 landmark locations on the body. Using the 91 landmark pose estimator, we present state-of-the art results for 3D human pose and shape estimation using an order of magnitude less training data and without assumptions about gender or pose in the fitting procedure. We show that UP-3D can be enhanced with these improved fits to grow in quantity and quality, which makes the system deployable on large scale. The data, code and models are available for research purposes.

arXiv project/code/data Project Page [BibTex]

Lassner, C., Romero, J., Kiefel, M., Bogo, F., Black, M. J., Gehler, P. V. Unite the People: Closing the Loop Between 3D and 2D Human Representations In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

arXiv project/code/data Project Page [BibTex]

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System and method for simulating realistic clothing

Black, M. J., Guan, P.

June 2017, U.S.~Patent 9,679,409 B2 (misc)

Abstract
Systems, methods, and computer-readable storage media for simulating realistic clothing. The system generates a clothing deformation model for a clothing type, wherein the clothing deformation model factors a change of clothing shape due to rigid limb rotation, pose-independent body shape, and pose-dependent deformations. Next, the system generates a custom-shaped garment for a given body by mapping, via the clothing deformation model, body shape parameters to clothing shape parameters. The system then automatically dresses the given body with the custom- shaped garment.

Google Patents pdf [BibTex]

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Human Shape Estimation using Statistical Body Models

Loper, M. M.

University of Tübingen, May 2017 (thesis)

Abstract
Human body estimation methods transform real-world observations into predictions about human body state. These estimation methods benefit a variety of health, entertainment, clothing, and ergonomics applications. State may include pose, overall body shape, and appearance. Body state estimation is underconstrained by observations; ambiguity presents itself both in the form of missing data within observations, and also in the form of unknown correspondences between observations. We address this challenge with the use of a statistical body model: a data-driven virtual human. This helps resolve ambiguity in two ways. First, it fills in missing data, meaning that incomplete observations still result in complete shape estimates. Second, the model provides a statistically-motivated penalty for unlikely states, which enables more plausible body shape estimates. Body state inference requires more than a body model; we therefore build obser- vation models whose output is compared with real observations. In this thesis, body state is estimated from three types of observations: 3D motion capture markers, depth and color images, and high-resolution 3D scans. In each case, a forward process is proposed which simulates observations. By comparing observations to the results of the forward process, state can be adjusted to minimize the difference between simulated and observed data. We use gradient-based methods because they are critical to the precise estimation of state with a large number of parameters. The contributions of this work include three parts. First, we propose a method for the estimation of body shape, nonrigid deformation, and pose from 3D markers. Second, we present a concise approach to differentiating through the rendering process, with application to body shape estimation. And finally, we present a statistical body model trained from human body scans, with state-of-the-art fidelity, good runtime performance, and compatibility with existing animation packages.

Official Version [BibTex]

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Learning Inference Models for Computer Vision

Jampani, V.

MPI for Intelligent Systems and University of Tübingen, 2017 (phdthesis)

Abstract
Computer vision can be understood as the ability to perform 'inference' on image data. Breakthroughs in computer vision technology are often marked by advances in inference techniques, as even the model design is often dictated by the complexity of inference in them. This thesis proposes learning based inference schemes and demonstrates applications in computer vision. We propose techniques for inference in both generative and discriminative computer vision models. Despite their intuitive appeal, the use of generative models in vision is hampered by the difficulty of posterior inference, which is often too complex or too slow to be practical. We propose techniques for improving inference in two widely used techniques: Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and message-passing inference. Our inference strategy is to learn separate discriminative models that assist Bayesian inference in a generative model. Experiments on a range of generative vision models show that the proposed techniques accelerate the inference process and/or converge to better solutions. A main complication in the design of discriminative models is the inclusion of prior knowledge in a principled way. For better inference in discriminative models, we propose techniques that modify the original model itself, as inference is simple evaluation of the model. We concentrate on convolutional neural network (CNN) models and propose a generalization of standard spatial convolutions, which are the basic building blocks of CNN architectures, to bilateral convolutions. First, we generalize the existing use of bilateral filters and then propose new neural network architectures with learnable bilateral filters, which we call `Bilateral Neural Networks'. We show how the bilateral filtering modules can be used for modifying existing CNN architectures for better image segmentation and propose a neural network approach for temporal information propagation in videos. Experiments demonstrate the potential of the proposed bilateral networks on a wide range of vision tasks and datasets. In summary, we propose learning based techniques for better inference in several computer vision models ranging from inverse graphics to freely parameterized neural networks. In generative vision models, our inference techniques alleviate some of the crucial hurdles in Bayesian posterior inference, paving new ways for the use of model based machine learning in vision. In discriminative CNN models, the proposed filter generalizations aid in the design of new neural network architectures that can handle sparse high-dimensional data as well as provide a way for incorporating prior knowledge into CNNs.

pdf [BibTex]

Jampani, V. Learning Inference Models for Computer Vision MPI for Intelligent Systems and University of Tübingen, 2017 (phdthesis)

pdf [BibTex]

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Towards Accurate Marker-less Human Shape and Pose Estimation over Time

Huang, Y., Bogo, F., Lassner, C., Kanazawa, A., Gehler, P. V., Romero, J., Akhter, I., Black, M. J.

In International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), pages: 421-430, 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Existing markerless motion capture methods often assume known backgrounds, static cameras, and sequence specific motion priors, limiting their application scenarios. Here we present a fully automatic method that, given multiview videos, estimates 3D human pose and body shape. We take the recently proposed SMPLify method [12] as the base method and extend it in several ways. First we fit a 3D human body model to 2D features detected in multi-view images. Second, we use a CNN method to segment the person in each image and fit the 3D body model to the contours, further improving accuracy. Third we utilize a generic and robust DCT temporal prior to handle the left and right side swapping issue sometimes introduced by the 2D pose estimator. Validation on standard benchmarks shows our results are comparable to the state of the art and also provide a realistic 3D shape avatar. We also demonstrate accurate results on HumanEva and on challenging monocular sequences of dancing from YouTube.

Code pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Capturing Hand-Object Interaction and Reconstruction of Manipulated Objects

Tzionas, D.

University of Bonn, 2017 (phdthesis)

Abstract
Hand motion capture with an RGB-D sensor gained recently a lot of research attention, however, even most recent approaches focus on the case of a single isolated hand. We focus instead on hands that interact with other hands or with a rigid or articulated object. Our framework successfully captures motion in such scenarios by combining a generative model with discriminatively trained salient points, collision detection and physics simulation to achieve a low tracking error with physically plausible poses. All components are unified in a single objective function that can be optimized with standard optimization techniques. We initially assume a-priori knowledge of the object's shape and skeleton. In case of unknown object shape there are existing 3d reconstruction methods that capitalize on distinctive geometric or texture features. These methods though fail for textureless and highly symmetric objects like household articles, mechanical parts or toys. We show that extracting 3d hand motion for in-hand scanning effectively facilitates the reconstruction of such objects and we fuse the rich additional information of hands into a 3d reconstruction pipeline. Finally, although shape reconstruction is enough for rigid objects, there is a lack of tools that build rigged models of articulated objects that deform realistically using RGB-D data. We propose a method that creates a fully rigged model consisting of a watertight mesh, embedded skeleton and skinning weights by employing a combination of deformable mesh tracking, motion segmentation based on spectral clustering and skeletonization based on mean curvature flow.

Thesis link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

2012

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Assessment of Computational Visual Attention Models on Medical Images

Jampani, V., Ujjwal, , Sivaswamy, J., Vaidya, V.

Proceedings of the Eighth Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, pages: 80:1-80:8, ACM, Mumbai, India, December 2012 (conference)

Abstract
Visual attention plays a major role in our lives. Our very perception (which very much decides our survival) depends on it - like perceiving a predator while walking through a forest, perceiving a fast car coming from the front on a busy road or even spotting our favorite color out of the many colors. In Medical Imaging, where medical experts have to take major clinical decisions based on the examination of images of various kinds (CT, MRI etc), visual attention plays a pivotal role. It makes the medical experts fixate on any abnormal behavior exhibited in the medical image and helps in speedy diagnosis. Many previous works (see the paper for details) have exhibited this important fact and the model proposed by Nodine and Kundel highlights the important role of visual attention in medical image diagnosis. Visual attention involves two components - Bottom-Up and Top-Down.In the present work, we examine a number of established computational models of visual attention in the context of chest X-rays (infected with Pneumoconiosis) and retinal images (having hard exudates). The fundamental motivation is to try to understand the applicability of visual attention models in the context of different types of abnormalities. Our assessment of four popular visual attention models, is extensive and shows that they are able to pick up abnormal features reasonably well. We compare the models towards detecting subtle abnormalities and high-contrast lesions. Although significant scope of improvements exists especially in picking up more subtle abnormalities and getting more selective towards picking up more abnormalities and less normal structures, the presented assessment shows that visual attention indeed shows a promise for inclusion in the main field of medical image analysis

url pdf poster link (url) [BibTex]

2012

Jampani, V., Ujjwal, , Sivaswamy, J., Vaidya, V. Assessment of Computational Visual Attention Models on Medical Images Proceedings of the Eighth Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, pages: 80:1-80:8, ACM, Mumbai, India, December 2012 (conference)

url pdf poster link (url) [BibTex]

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Virtual Human Bodies with Clothing and Hair: From Images to Animation

Guan, P.

Brown University, Department of Computer Science, December 2012 (phdthesis)

pdf [BibTex]

Guan, P. Virtual Human Bodies with Clothing and Hair: From Images to Animation Brown University, Department of Computer Science, December 2012 (phdthesis)

pdf [BibTex]

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Lie Bodies: A Manifold Representation of 3D Human Shape

Freifeld, O., Black, M. J.

In European Conf. on Computer Vision (ECCV), pages: 1-14, Part I, LNCS 7572, (Editors: A. Fitzgibbon et al. (Eds.)), Springer-Verlag, October 2012 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Three-dimensional object shape is commonly represented in terms of deformations of a triangular mesh from an exemplar shape. Existing models, however, are based on a Euclidean representation of shape deformations. In contrast, we argue that shape has a manifold structure: For example, summing the shape deformations for two people does not necessarily yield a deformation corresponding to a valid human shape, nor does the Euclidean difference of these two deformations provide a meaningful measure of shape dissimilarity. Consequently, we define a novel manifold for shape representation, with emphasis on body shapes, using a new Lie group of deformations. This has several advantages. First we define triangle deformations exactly, removing non-physical deformations and redundant degrees of freedom common to previous methods. Second, the Riemannian structure of Lie Bodies enables a more meaningful definition of body shape similarity by measuring distance between bodies on the manifold of body shape deformations. Third, the group structure allows the valid composition of deformations. This is important for models that factor body shape deformations into multiple causes or represent shape as a linear combination of basis shapes. Finally, body shape variation is modeled using statistics on manifolds. Instead of modeling Euclidean shape variation with Principal Component Analysis we capture shape variation on the manifold using Principal Geodesic Analysis. Our experiments show consistent visual and quantitative advantages of Lie Bodies over traditional Euclidean models of shape deformation and our representation can be easily incorporated into existing methods.

pdf supplemental material youtube poster eigenshape video code Project Page Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Freifeld, O., Black, M. J. Lie Bodies: A Manifold Representation of 3D Human Shape In European Conf. on Computer Vision (ECCV), pages: 1-14, Part I, LNCS 7572, (Editors: A. Fitzgibbon et al. (Eds.)), Springer-Verlag, October 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf supplemental material youtube poster eigenshape video code Project Page Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Coregistration: Simultaneous alignment and modeling of articulated 3D shape

Hirshberg, D., Loper, M., Rachlin, E., Black, M.

In European Conf. on Computer Vision (ECCV), pages: 242-255, LNCS 7577, Part IV, (Editors: A. Fitzgibbon et al. (Eds.)), Springer-Verlag, October 2012 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Three-dimensional (3D) shape models are powerful because they enable the inference of object shape from incomplete, noisy, or ambiguous 2D or 3D data. For example, realistic parameterized 3D human body models have been used to infer the shape and pose of people from images. To train such models, a corpus of 3D body scans is typically brought into registration by aligning a common 3D human-shaped template to each scan. This is an ill-posed problem that typically involves solving an optimization problem with regularization terms that penalize implausible deformations of the template. When aligning a corpus, however, we can do better than generic regularization. If we have a model of how the template can deform then alignments can be regularized by this model. Constructing a model of deformations, however, requires having a corpus that is already registered. We address this chicken-and-egg problem by approaching modeling and registration together. By minimizing a single objective function, we reliably obtain high quality registration of noisy, incomplete, laser scans, while simultaneously learning a highly realistic articulated body model. The model greatly improves robustness to noise and missing data. Since the model explains a corpus of body scans, it captures how body shape varies across people and poses.

pdf publisher site poster supplemental material (400MB) Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Hirshberg, D., Loper, M., Rachlin, E., Black, M. Coregistration: Simultaneous alignment and modeling of articulated 3D shape In European Conf. on Computer Vision (ECCV), pages: 242-255, LNCS 7577, Part IV, (Editors: A. Fitzgibbon et al. (Eds.)), Springer-Verlag, October 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf publisher site poster supplemental material (400MB) Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Lessons and insights from creating a synthetic optical flow benchmark

Wulff, J., Butler, D. J., Stanley, G. B., Black, M. J.

In ECCV Workshop on Unsolved Problems in Optical Flow and Stereo Estimation, pages: 168-177, Part II, LNCS 7584, (Editors: A. Fusiello et al. (Eds.)), Springer-Verlag, October 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf dataset poster youtube Project Page [BibTex]

Wulff, J., Butler, D. J., Stanley, G. B., Black, M. J. Lessons and insights from creating a synthetic optical flow benchmark In ECCV Workshop on Unsolved Problems in Optical Flow and Stereo Estimation, pages: 168-177, Part II, LNCS 7584, (Editors: A. Fusiello et al. (Eds.)), Springer-Verlag, October 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf dataset poster youtube Project Page [BibTex]

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3D2PM – 3D Deformable Part Models

Pepik, B., Gehler, P., Stark, M., Schiele, B.

In Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), pages: 356-370, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (Editors: Fitzgibbon, Andrew W. and Lazebnik, Svetlana and Perona, Pietro and Sato, Yoichi and Schmid, Cordelia), Springer, Firenze, October 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf video poster Project Page [BibTex]

Pepik, B., Gehler, P., Stark, M., Schiele, B. 3D2PM – 3D Deformable Part Models In Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), pages: 356-370, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (Editors: Fitzgibbon, Andrew W. and Lazebnik, Svetlana and Perona, Pietro and Sato, Yoichi and Schmid, Cordelia), Springer, Firenze, October 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf video poster Project Page [BibTex]

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A naturalistic open source movie for optical flow evaluation

Butler, D. J., Wulff, J., Stanley, G. B., Black, M. J.

In European Conf. on Computer Vision (ECCV), pages: 611-625, Part IV, LNCS 7577, (Editors: A. Fitzgibbon et al. (Eds.)), Springer-Verlag, October 2012 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Ground truth optical flow is difficult to measure in real scenes with natural motion. As a result, optical flow data sets are restricted in terms of size, complexity, and diversity, making optical flow algorithms difficult to train and test on realistic data. We introduce a new optical flow data set derived from the open source 3D animated short film Sintel. This data set has important features not present in the popular Middlebury flow evaluation: long sequences, large motions, specular reflections, motion blur, defocus blur, and atmospheric effects. Because the graphics data that generated the movie is open source, we are able to render scenes under conditions of varying complexity to evaluate where existing flow algorithms fail. We evaluate several recent optical flow algorithms and find that current highly-ranked methods on the Middlebury evaluation have difficulty with this more complex data set suggesting further research on optical flow estimation is needed. To validate the use of synthetic data, we compare the image- and flow-statistics of Sintel to those of real films and videos and show that they are similar. The data set, metrics, and evaluation website are publicly available.

pdf dataset youtube talk supplemental material Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Butler, D. J., Wulff, J., Stanley, G. B., Black, M. J. A naturalistic open source movie for optical flow evaluation In European Conf. on Computer Vision (ECCV), pages: 611-625, Part IV, LNCS 7577, (Editors: A. Fitzgibbon et al. (Eds.)), Springer-Verlag, October 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf dataset youtube talk supplemental material Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Characterization of 3-D Volumetric Probabilistic Scenes for Object Recognition

Restrepo, M. I., Mayer, B. A., Ulusoy, A. O., Mundy, J. L.

In Selected Topics in Signal Processing, IEEE Journal of, 6(5):522-537, September 2012 (inproceedings)

Abstract
This paper presents a new volumetric representation for categorizing objects in large-scale 3-D scenes reconstructed from image sequences. This work uses a probabilistic volumetric model (PVM) that combines the ideas of background modeling and volumetric multi-view reconstruction to handle the uncertainty inherent in the problem of reconstructing 3-D structures from 2-D images. The advantages of probabilistic modeling have been demonstrated by recent application of the PVM representation to video image registration, change detection and classification of changes based on PVM context. The applications just mentioned, operate on 2-D projections of the PVM. This paper presents the first work to characterize and use the local 3-D information in the scenes. Two approaches to local feature description are proposed and compared: 1) features derived from a PCA analysis of model neighborhoods; and 2) features derived from the coefficients of a 3-D Taylor series expansion within each neighborhood. The resulting description is used in a bag-of-features approach to classify buildings, houses, cars, planes, and parking lots learned from aerial imagery collected over Providence, RI. It is shown that both feature descriptions explain the data with similar accuracy and their effectiveness for dense-feature categorization is compared for the different classes. Finally, 3-D extensions of the Harris corner detector and a Hessian-based detector are used to detect salient features. Both types of salient features are evaluated through object categorization experiments, where only features with maximal response are retained. For most saliency criteria tested, features based on the determinant of the Hessian achieved higher classification accuracy than Harris-based features.

pdf DOI [BibTex]

Restrepo, M. I., Mayer, B. A., Ulusoy, A. O., Mundy, J. L. Characterization of 3-D Volumetric Probabilistic Scenes for Object Recognition In Selected Topics in Signal Processing, IEEE Journal of, 6(5):522-537, September 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf DOI [BibTex]

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A framework for relating neural activity to freely moving behavior

Foster, J. D., Nuyujukian, P., Freifeld, O., Ryu, S., Black, M. J., Shenoy, K. V.

In 34th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC’12), pages: 2736 -2739 , IEEE, San Diego, August 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf Project Page [BibTex]

Foster, J. D., Nuyujukian, P., Freifeld, O., Ryu, S., Black, M. J., Shenoy, K. V. A framework for relating neural activity to freely moving behavior In 34th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC’12), pages: 2736 -2739 , IEEE, San Diego, August 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf Project Page [BibTex]

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Pottics – The Potts Topic Model for Semantic Image Segmentation

Dann, C., Gehler, P., Roth, S., Nowozin, S.

In Proceedings of 34th DAGM Symposium, pages: 397-407, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (Editors: Pinz, Axel and Pock, Thomas and Bischof, Horst and Leberl, Franz), Springer, August 2012 (inproceedings)

code pdf poster [BibTex]

Dann, C., Gehler, P., Roth, S., Nowozin, S. Pottics – The Potts Topic Model for Semantic Image Segmentation In Proceedings of 34th DAGM Symposium, pages: 397-407, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (Editors: Pinz, Axel and Pock, Thomas and Bischof, Horst and Leberl, Franz), Springer, August 2012 (inproceedings)

code pdf poster [BibTex]

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Psoriasis segmentation through chromatic regions and Geometric Active Contours

Bogo, F., Samory, M., Belloni Fortina, A., Piaserico, S., Peserico, E.

In 34th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC’12), pages: 5388-5391, San Diego, August 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Bogo, F., Samory, M., Belloni Fortina, A., Piaserico, S., Peserico, E. Psoriasis segmentation through chromatic regions and Geometric Active Contours In 34th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC’12), pages: 5388-5391, San Diego, August 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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PCA-enhanced stochastic optimization methods

Kuznetsova, A., Pons-Moll, G., Rosenhahn, B.

In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), August 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Kuznetsova, A., Pons-Moll, G., Rosenhahn, B. PCA-enhanced stochastic optimization methods In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), August 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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Quasi-Newton Methods: A New Direction

Hennig, P., Kiefel, M.

In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Machine Learning, pages: 25-32, ICML ’12, (Editors: John Langford and Joelle Pineau), Omnipress, New York, NY, USA, July 2012 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Four decades after their invention, quasi- Newton methods are still state of the art in unconstrained numerical optimization. Although not usually interpreted thus, these are learning algorithms that fit a local quadratic approximation to the objective function. We show that many, including the most popular, quasi-Newton methods can be interpreted as approximations of Bayesian linear regression under varying prior assumptions. This new notion elucidates some shortcomings of classical algorithms, and lights the way to a novel nonparametric quasi-Newton method, which is able to make more efficient use of available information at computational cost similar to its predecessors.

website+code pdf link (url) [BibTex]

Hennig, P., Kiefel, M. Quasi-Newton Methods: A New Direction In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Machine Learning, pages: 25-32, ICML ’12, (Editors: John Langford and Joelle Pineau), Omnipress, New York, NY, USA, July 2012 (inproceedings)

website+code pdf link (url) [BibTex]

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Learning Search Based Inference for Object Detection

Gehler, P., Lehmann, A.

In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) workshop on Inferning: Interactions between Inference and Learning, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, July 2012, short version of BMVC11 paper (http://ps.is.tue.mpg.de/publications/31/get_file) (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Gehler, P., Lehmann, A. Learning Search Based Inference for Object Detection In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) workshop on Inferning: Interactions between Inference and Learning, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, July 2012, short version of BMVC11 paper (http://ps.is.tue.mpg.de/publications/31/get_file) (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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From Pixels to Layers: Joint Motion Estimation and Segmentation

Sun, D.

Brown University, Department of Computer Science, July 2012 (phdthesis)

pdf [BibTex]

Sun, D. From Pixels to Layers: Joint Motion Estimation and Segmentation Brown University, Department of Computer Science, July 2012 (phdthesis)

pdf [BibTex]

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Distribution Fields for Tracking

Sevilla-Lara, L., Learned-Miller, E.

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Providence, RI, USA, June 2012 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Visual tracking of general objects often relies on the assumption that gradient descent of the alignment function will reach the global optimum. A common technique to smooth the objective function is to blur the image. However, blurring the image destroys image information, which can cause the target to be lost. To address this problem we introduce a method for building an image descriptor using distribution fields (DFs), a representation that allows smoothing the objective function without destroying information about pixel values. We present experimental evidence on the superiority of the width of the basin of attraction around the global optimum of DFs over other descriptors. DFs also allow the representation of uncertainty about the tracked object. This helps in disregarding outliers during tracking (like occlusions or small misalignments) without modeling them explicitly. Finally, this provides a convenient way to aggregate the observations of the object through time and maintain an updated model. We present a simple tracking algorithm that uses DFs and obtains state-of-the-art results on standard benchmarks.

pdf Matlab code [BibTex]

Sevilla-Lara, L., Learned-Miller, E. Distribution Fields for Tracking In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Providence, RI, USA, June 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf Matlab code [BibTex]

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From pictorial structures to deformable structures

Zuffi, S., Freifeld, O., Black, M. J.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 3546-3553, IEEE, June 2012 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Pictorial Structures (PS) define a probabilistic model of 2D articulated objects in images. Typical PS models assume an object can be represented by a set of rigid parts connected with pairwise constraints that define the prior probability of part configurations. These models are widely used to represent non-rigid articulated objects such as humans and animals despite the fact that such objects have parts that deform non-rigidly. Here we define a new Deformable Structures (DS) model that is a natural extension of previous PS models and that captures the non-rigid shape deformation of the parts. Each part in a DS model is represented by a low-dimensional shape deformation space and pairwise potentials between parts capture how the shape varies with pose and the shape of neighboring parts. A key advantage of such a model is that it more accurately models object boundaries. This enables image likelihood models that are more discriminative than previous PS likelihoods. This likelihood is learned using training imagery annotated using a DS “puppet.” We focus on a human DS model learned from 2D projections of a realistic 3D human body model and use it to infer human poses in images using a form of non-parametric belief propagation.

pdf sup mat code poster Project Page Project Page Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Zuffi, S., Freifeld, O., Black, M. J. From pictorial structures to deformable structures In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 3546-3553, IEEE, June 2012 (inproceedings)

pdf sup mat code poster Project Page Project Page Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Teaching 3D Geometry to Deformable Part Models

Pepik, B., Stark, M., Gehler, P., Schiele, B.

In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 3362 -3369, IEEE, Providence, RI, USA, June 2012, oral presentation (inproceedings)

pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Pepik, B., Stark, M., Gehler, P., Schiele, B. Teaching 3D Geometry to Deformable Part Models In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 3362 -3369, IEEE, Providence, RI, USA, June 2012, oral presentation (inproceedings)

pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Branch-and-price global optimization for multi-view multi-object tracking

Leal-Taixé, L., Pons-Moll, G., Rosenhahn, B.

In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2012 (inproceedings)

project page paper poster [BibTex]

Leal-Taixé, L., Pons-Moll, G., Rosenhahn, B. Branch-and-price global optimization for multi-view multi-object tracking In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2012 (inproceedings)

project page paper poster [BibTex]

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A physically-based approach to reflection separation

Kong, N., Tai, Y., Shin, S. Y.

In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 9-16, June 2012 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We propose a physically-based approach to separate reflection using multiple polarized images with a background scene captured behind glass. The input consists of three polarized images, each captured from the same view point but with a different polarizer angle separated by 45 degrees. The output is the high-quality separation of the reflection and background layers from each of the input images. A main technical challenge for this problem is that the mixing coefficient for the reflection and background layers depends on the angle of incidence and the orientation of the plane of incidence, which are spatially-varying over the pixels of an image. Exploiting physical properties of polarization for a double-surfaced glass medium, we propose an algorithm which automatically finds the optimal separation of the reflection and background layers. Thorough experiments, we demonstrate that our approach can generate superior results to those of previous methods.

Publisher site [BibTex]

Kong, N., Tai, Y., Shin, S. Y. A physically-based approach to reflection separation In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 9-16, June 2012 (inproceedings)

Publisher site [BibTex]